In the final week, the pressures ran riot. Lofty Rosalyn fainted at her desk and I volunteered to drive her home to Wimbledon, where clean air and a cup of tea effected a rapid recovery. I had grown quite fond over the past fortnight of the leggy, plain-Jane temp, whose blank exterior concealed formidable analytical powers and prejudices. I returned from lunch one day to find her speed-reading my Isaac Deutscher tract on Stalin. ‘Conscienceless apologetics,’ she snorted, slamming the book on my half of the deak.

‘What do you mean?’

‘All the excuses he gives for Stalin’s forced collectivisation – greater efficiency, equality, productivity, social harmony – are complete eyewash. There was never any economic justification for it, whatever dewy-eyed liberals might pretend. Abolish the ownership of land and you remove the farmers’ incentive to produce food. It’s a blueprint for famine, which directly resulted.’

‘But what of the ideological motivation?’

‘The object of Communism, as I understand it, is to spread wealth, not to starve millions. Stalin is just another Hitler wearing an avuncular mask; and this book is fundamentally an academic exoneration of mass murder. Burn it.’

These were bold sentiments to shout at the top of one’s voice in a music company where most people thought with their hearts and voted with the left. Stalin, to many of us, was still good old Uncle Joe, our wartime ally with the friendly walrus moustache. Not to Ros. She proceeded to bullet-point each and every one of his supposed achievements and rip them to shreds with her laser-guided mind. I liked her more each day. Away from the office, reclined on a suburban sofa, sipping Lapsang Souchong tea, I sensed an invitation and snaked a tentative arm around her shoulder. Rosalyn inclined her formidable head, ever so slightly, towards me. I asked if she might, one evening, care to go out with me. She ruffled my hair and, half amusedly, accepted. Then we kissed, and she turned serious, stroking my cheek, gripping my forearm. Her mother came home in mid-fumble, and I left on a cloud. Rosalyn was the first girl I had ever summoned the confidence to ask out.

As things turned out, I never did get to date her. A week after our world came crashing down, Rosalyn accepted a post in the foreign-currency department of the Bank of England, where she rose, unwed, to the rank of deputy director. In those prejudicial times, it was considered incompatible for a senior female official to have a domestic life. I met her again, years later, at a barmitzvah, erect and drably dressed. We exchanged tart, wary platitudes.